Pub stock insurance claims: what you need written down before anything goes wrong

Pub insurance covers events, not leakage. A cellar under two feet of water, or a break-in through the back door. It does not cover the slow unexplained gap on your stocktake, it pays cost price rather than what you would have sold the stock for, and when the day comes, the claim is settled on paperwork you either have or don't. Most licensees find out which on the wrong side of the event. Here is what the cover actually says, and the short list of records that turn a claim from an argument into arithmetic.

I say this as a licensee, not a broker, and policies differ, so the only wording that matters in the end is your own schedule. But the shape of stock cover is consistent across the market, and the shape is what catches people out.

What's insurable and what never was

The loss	Covered?
Cellar flood, fire, escape of water over the stock	Yes, standard perils
Break-in with forced entry, stock taken	Yes, with a crime reference
Walk-in theft, shoplifting, pilfering	No. Theft cover needs forced entry or threat of violence, and AXA's wording excludes shoplifting outright
Unexplained stocktake variance	No. That is a stock control problem, and no insurer touches it
Cooler or freezer failure spoiling stock	Only with deterioration of stock cover, usually an extension, occupation-dependent
Stock in transit or temporarily elsewhere	Partially. AXA's standard wording covers up to 10% of stock away from the premises

The line that matters most is the theft one. If someone walks a bottle out the door, that is your loss, every time. The insurance answer to pilfering is the same as the audit answer: count often enough that you see it, then fix the process. The stock loss diagnosis guide covers which kind of gap you actually have.

Cost price, not the till price

Stock is settled at what it costs you to replace, not what it rings through the till at. AXA states it plainly: the cost of your stock, not the retail price. So the £700 a flooded pallet of lager would have taken over the bar is maybe £250 of claim. The £450 of margin that drowned with it is not gone from the policy entirely, but it lives under business interruption cover, a separate section with its own sum insured that plenty of pubs skip to save premium. Worth knowing which decision you made before the water arrives.

One quiet upside: cost price for duty-paid stock means cost including the duty, because that is what replacing it costs you. Nearly 50p a pint on standard-strength draught. If spoiled beer is going back to the supplier for an ullage credit instead, that is a different route entirely, covered in the ullage and duty credit guide, and you cannot claim the same barrel twice.

The sum insured trap, especially at Christmas

Your stock sum insured is a number somebody picked, probably at renewal, probably in a quiet month. Livingstones' pub insurance guide makes the point that matters: set it to peak stock levels, not average ones. A cellar loaded for December can carry half as much again as a wet Tuesday in February, and if your sum insured reflects February, a December loss gets scaled down for underinsurance.

Some policies handle this for you. AXA's standard stock wording adds an automatic 30% uplift through November and December, and for 14 days either side of bank holidays. Check whether yours does, in the schedule, before you load the cellar for Christmas. If there is no seasonal clause, ring the broker and adjust the number for the season. It is a phone call, and it is the cheapest fix in this whole guide.

The evidence list

A stock claim is a reconstruction. The insurer's loss adjuster wants to know what was there the moment before the event, and everything on this list exists to answer that one question.

Record	Why the adjuster wants it
Your last stocktake, dated, itemised, valued at cost	The anchor. Everything else builds forward from this number
Purchase invoices and delivery notes since that count	Proves what arrived after the anchor
Till sales since that count	Proves what left legitimately, converted to cost
Wastage log and incident log	Explains the gaps that aren't the event, so they don't muddy the claim
Photos before anything is moved or binned	Condition and quantity evidence you cannot recreate later
Police crime reference	Required for any theft claim
A dated list of everything destroyed, with quantities	The claim itself. Keep the damaged stock until the insurer says otherwise, they may want to inspect it

The arithmetic the adjuster runs

Opening stock from your last count, plus purchases since, minus sales at cost since, equals what should have been in the building. That is the same sum a stock auditor runs, and the same sum your own stocktake runs. The difference is leverage. If your last count is three weeks old, the reconstruction is tight and the settlement follows the arithmetic. If it is six months old, every step of that chain is an estimate, and estimates get negotiated, and the negotiating power is all on their side because the burden of proof is yours.

A monthly count is many things, and one of the quieter ones is a permanently up-to-date proof of what your cellar is worth. The same records also serve the year-end valuation for your accounts, so you are not doing extra work, you are doing the same work once and using it twice. If you count on paper, the free stocktake template produces a dated, itemised valuation that does the job.

Where software earns its keep here

Every count closed in StockTap is a timestamped valuation report at cost, line by line, exportable as a CSV, with the wastage entries sitting alongside. In a claim, that is the anchor document, produced in thirty seconds, for any count you have ever closed. Nobody buys stocktaking software for the insurance claim they hope never to make. But the pub that counts weekly walks into that conversation with evidence, and the pub that doesn't walks in with memory.

None of this is financial advice, and I am not your broker. Read your own schedule, ask the awkward questions at renewal, and if the answers are vague, that is information too.